Voltage Gain Enhancement of Solid-State Pulse Modulator by Adapting Sequential cum Parallel Charging of Capacitors

Abstract

This article proposes a new capacitor charging mechanism, “sequential cum parallel charging of capacitors (S+P-CC),” for enhancing the voltage gain of the pulse modulators. It also proposes a new high-gain pulse modulator, i.e., a modular bipolar pulse generator (MBPG). This article first introduces the charging mechanism, and then to show its feasibility, the mechanism is applied to the MBPG. The capacitors of the MBPG are charged using the proposed “S+P-CC” mechanism and suitably enabled the MBPG to achieve an enhanced voltage gain. In addition to the enhanced voltage gain, the MBPG also offers the following benefits: flexibility in generating the pulsed output at variable amplitude, polarity, width, and repetitiveness. To understand the concept, a detailed analytical approach is presented in the article, and to verify the correctness of the approach, 1.2-kV (pk-pk) pulse generating MBPG prototype consisting of two modules and two stages is designed and tested. The experimental results provided validate that the prototype successfully generated 2−10 μs, unipolar/bipolar pulses with a repetition rate of 10,000 pulses per second.